Fully burdening the costs of fossil fuels

[kpete]

Fully burdening the costs of fossil fuels

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type. How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody? Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy. We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

more:
http://needlenose.com/wp/2010/07/12/fully-burdening-the-costs-of-fossil-fuels/